If this works, I did it!

[azurelunatic]

I am attempting to set up a way to easily but not indiscriminately crosspost my Dreamwidth entries to my Twitter account. There will be times that I will want my entries to appear there without further intervention from me, and times that I really would not want that.


This is how you find the feed for your journal, or for a specific tag. I'm trying a specific tag, in my case 'crosspost', to indicate entries that I want to push offsite. (I can't use 'twitter' as my tag to crosspost to Twitter, because that's the tag that incoming entries collected from Twitter get, and that could become very quickly bizarre and/or obnoxious.)

Since Dreamwidth doesn't have a built-in push-entries-to-Twitter function (just LJ and some LJcode sites) I have to look elsewhere for something to glue these things together.

I have had good luck in general with If This, Then That in gluing pieces of internet together.

Right now, ifttt isn't recognizing the tag feed for my 'crosspost' tag as valid, because there are no entries in it. I'm about to fix that.

If all works well, ifttt will then start to watch for my 'crosspost' entries, and post them to my Twitter account. We shall see!

Comments

[azurelunatic]

It works.

The tag should exist, with at least one entry in it that you don't need automatically crossposted, before you set things up. This will allow ifttt to recognize the tag as a valid feed.

Once the task has been set up, post a new entry using the tag, and it will then crosspost.

[trixieleitz]

\o/

Presumably iftt needs the tag on the entry at time of posting? Or does it just check the feed every $SomeInterval?

[azurelunatic]

It checks the feed intermittently. It needs to have entries in the feed at the time of setup, and does not post entries that were already in the feed at time of setup.

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

Ifttt runs tasks every fifteen minutes, starting at the quarter-hours.

[emceeaich]

Ifttt sounds very close to Ifritt, which suggests to me that one should be very careful what they wish for with those sorts of services.

[azurelunatic]

If I'd used the tag 'twitter', as would have been somewhat intuitive, I would have then been surprised by my Twitter roundup entries showing up. Fun for the whole family!

[jd]

Hot gay taxi sex?

[ursamajor]

IFTTT is the best. (It's what I'm using to crosspost from Pinboard to Delicious right now, though Delicious is swiftly becoming a ghost town.)

[azurelunatic]

Oh, Delicious.

[andrewducker]

Ifttt is awesome. I had problems using it to post from LJ to elsewhere, because they were hitting it often enough to be caught up in the bot filter. I hope this doesn't happen to you with DW.

[azurelunatic]

Here's hoping! And since DW doesn't have to be as ... hm, aggressive? proactive? assertive? ... about bot defense as LJ does, and there are fewer people on DW overall, I have optimism about the general odds of success.

[pixel]

I'm having a difficult time making this work for me :/ ifttt doesn't seem to want to recognize my tag, even 'tho I can get a feed for it on dw.

[azurelunatic]

Are there public entries on that tag already? It doesn't recognize the tag-feed unless there's something in there. I'm not sure how fresh it needs to be.

[pixel]

Ah, it's probably 'public' that's the problem >.< thanks

[chagrined]

You know, I've never actually used ifttt myself! Someone linked me to it the other day and I was all, "uh, okay...? what do I do with it?" And this is, indeed, a good example of something to do with it! I guess I am just like, heh, not very much an automated-task or like, bash-scripting type person? I read what it was and scratched my head and couldn't think of anything I do or want to do that it could do for me. So anywho it is cool to read other ppl's examples!

[azurelunatic]

They also have a recipes area, where you can see the stuff that other people have set up and shared.

[existence]

Oooh, that's clever. I should really sit down and do more with my ITTT account.

[automaticdoor]

Question! Does this work if the entries are access-locked? I want to set up an ifttt so that I can alert people who are non-DW via email when I post here using the general feed for my DW. However, I access-lock everything. Do you have any idea? Should I just effing try this and not ask so many questions already, jesus christ? ;)

Edited to add: they're getting access via OpenID, in case that part sounded ridiculous. I post juuuust infrequently enough that I need to email people because it's really unfair to expect them to check.

[azurelunatic]

ifttt reads off the public feed & there's no provision for authenticating, so it wouldn't be able to see access-locked stuff. Alas.

[automaticdoor]

Rrrrrrrr. That makes sense. I was hoping there'd be some way around it. I'll have to come up with something else. Thanks!

[jd]

Can these people set up emailed notifications every time you update? That's something they'd have to do rather than something you could set up for them, which is a drawback, but it's the kind of set-and-forget thing that is useful.

[automaticdoor]

That is a really good idea! I will pass it along. Thank you!

[jd]

Glad I could help.

In general, trying to authenticate to locked content on LJ- or DW-like sites is a massive pain, so it's nice when there's a built-in site feature that does it for you :)

[celtic_maenad]

Is IFTTT what you use to post twitter summaries to DW? If not, what do you use?

[azurelunatic]

wibbble|semanticist wrote a lovely little script. It works just about perfectly.